Sound Research

A device that converts the electrical impulses of plants into music either through an IOS app or via midi on your computer.

The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the 20th century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces. This exhibition responds to his practice and proposes possibilities for listening to the past and its absence which remains. Centred around an audio play and a video installation, A Slightly Curving Place brings together writers, choreographers, composers, actors, dancers, musicians, field recordists, and sound, light, and graphic designers who engage and transform each other's work. Elements from Umashankar's biography serve as a compass amid the material in vitrines, as a dancing body positions the endlessness of time in relation to a series of ruptures that is history. Under a dome of speakers an assembly of listeners gathers to sense a past they cannot hear. The sound that arrives is only a record of sound as it might have been.

"What does it mean to listen to the past? An exhibition curated by Nida Ghouse"

"Coming to Know asks how listening to the past together might transform our sense of the knowledge held in common. It sets aside the visual techniques of the archaeological site, the museum, and the larger project of colonial modernity, and instead constitutes itself as a resonant structure-a future-oriented monument to historically situated listening bodies as well as a dwelling place for community now."

OPEN ACCESS FORTHCOMING AUTHORS ABOUT CONTACT A Slightly Curving Place asks what it means to listen to the past and its absence which remains. It responds to the practice of acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, whose life and work are a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces. Comprising a range of perspectives in which his propositions reverberate, the publication attends to what he does, and to the political and performative potential of the past that he opens up.

This electricalwalks.org website is the latest development of the electromagnetic sound world discovered by the German sound artist Christina Kubisch. Initiated through conversations between Kubisch and the artistic director of the Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music festival, this website was launched at the opening of 2019 Ultima Festival 2019. With the support of the Goethe-Institut and the Norwegian Arts Council, the electricalwalks.org website has been developed by the Ultima Festival and Christina Kubisch in collaboration with the Berlin webdesign company A & B ants and butterflies.

"a temporary installation selected for the 2019 LA Design Festival, invokes the 'Purpose of Joy', as a reframed response to the festival theme, 'Design with Purpose'. It brings the activity of uninhibited singing from the privacy of one's shower to a public street parking lot, in a dedicated urban, mini 'singing shower park'. In play and joy, vulnerable boundaries between private and public behaviors dissolve. Using an 'authorized' play setting for all ages, it explores where and how we feel comfortable to express joy, where we hide, and where we test our private face in public."

"For over 30 years, Basinski has worked with tape loops - capturing, slicing and warping the world around us on reel-to-reels. He makes field recordings from nature and shortwave radio signals, then literally cuts them up into short loops. His almost obsessively analog-focused work is often melancholic and strained, but always beautiful. But it is The Disintegration Loops, a project he finished the morning of September 11 while living in New York, for which he's best known."

"Cooking sounds resonate between the interest they draw in contemporary culture and the neglect in which we have been under-hearing them for many years. It is addressed by Tara Brabazon, a researcher in Cultural Studies, in her article The Sounds of Food: Defamiliarization and the Blinding of Taste.[1] She indicates that in food literature, the attention given to sound is reduced and approaches the acoustics of food as an "oral history" of the obsolete, unheard, undocumented geographies created around food, questioning the cultural hegemony of the visual, the tactile, and the gustatory. Anna Harris is an anthropologist studying topics related with well-being and nutrition who wrote the article The Hollow Knock and Other Sounds in Recipes,[2] where she examines how sound has been used to communicate and instruct the preparation of a group of food recipes including bread loafs. "

"With this special issue of Seismograf we are happy to present a new format of articles: Audio Papers. Audio papers resemble the regular essay or the academic text in that they deal with a certain topic of interest, but presented in the form of an audio production. The audio paper is an extension of the written paper through its specific use of media, a sonic awareness of aesthetics and materiality, and creative approach towards communication. The audio paper is a performative format working together with an affective and elaborate understanding of language. It is an experiment embracing intellectual arguments and creative work, papers and performances, written scholarship and sonic aesthetics."

Sounds are ever present: They envelop and permeate us, consolidating, dissolving and complicating relationships. Through a genuine agency of their own, sounds can articulate protest or approval, serve as a political statement or thought, and establish ties between people, entities and environments.

"Advocates of Electronic Voice Projection (EVP) claim they can use radio equipment to communicate with the dead. But are they just hearing what they want to hear?"

"We recover these wonderful images of the creation process of sound effects in Disney's early movies. "

"Rather than perceiving the world in real time, we're actually experiencing a memory of that perception. That is, our unconscious minds filter and process the world under the hood, and often make split-second decisions. When we become aware of those perceptions and decisions-that is, once they've risen to the level of consciousness-we're actually experiencing "memories of those unconscious decisions and actions," the authors explained. "

"taracatá trabaja uses the traditional Argentinian folk song, Malambo del Hornerito, as a point of departure. It is an ode to the Argentinian national bird-the serially procreating, monogamous, and hard working hornero who builds his home from spit and dirt. Created through long-distance collaboration, the musical composition of taracatá trabaja is derived from the two onomatopoeias in the folk song: taracatá, characterizing the sound of laborious work (i.e. fields being plowed and nails being hammered) and chapalea, a verb evolving from the sound of squelching in mud. In taracatá trabaja, the hand drawn hornero rests on the porcelain surface along the music score, reminding one of the complexities of making a home, and of labor and its imbued ideas of meritocracy, while reclaiming pleasure, well being and dignity."

"Neuhaus sees his role in the siren project as basically that of an eminently qualified and imaginative sound technician; he looks outside the art context for the project's ramifications. It is the mandatory localization and identification of the alarm sound by the hearer, rather than any emotional representation of it, that he feels must be emphasized."

"When I press record, I accept whatever comes. And it is a gift when something unpredictable happens." Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard describes how he works with the sounds of the world. From border walls and abandoned spaces to the sounds of death."

A Study Investigating the Relaxation Effects of the Music Track Weightless by Marconi Union in consultation with Lyz Cooper

"In fact, listening to that one song -- "Weightless" -- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants' overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resting rates."